Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

  Wavell’s long periods of silent reflection had turned him into a student of war. He knew that a good general relied less on coups d’oeil in the heat of battle than on such mundane things as reconnaissance, administration, and attention to transport and lines of supply. But his shyness also hid, or perhaps begot, a talent for taking risks. Shy people are good at waiting and thinking; a few of them are also good at eventually translating that into action. These few people tend to be excellent at waging war, which involves long periods of boredom interrupted briefly by bloodshed. Wavell believed that a general had to be a gambler in these decisive moments, for he had learned from the last war that speed and movement counted more than firepower. The Palestine campaigns had shown the value of a mobile cavalry; how much more formidable, he thought, would be his nifty little Bren-gun carriers racing across the desert. He knew the desert war would rely on fleetness of both movement and thought, because it would be fought less over territory and more like a naval battle, with mechanized armies chasing each other over sand rather than sea.

  On December 9, with reinforcements having arrived but his army still greatly outnumbered, Wavell counterattacked. His first triumph, made easier by his natural reticence, was to have kept this attack a complete surprise. The Egyptian prime minister commended him on being the first man to keep a secret in Cairo.22 With typical undersell, Wavell told the war correspondents that “this is not an offensive . . . you might call it an important raid.”23 Instead, his army began a stunning advance. Those who knew Wavell’s restraint in person were astonished by his boldness in battle. After taking Sidi Barrani easily on December 11, the British cleared all Italian forces out of Egypt in just four days. By the new year they were deep into Libya, and by February, when the British defeated the Italians at Beda Fomm, they had conquered the whole of Cyrenaica and were on the verge of overrunning the last of the Italian forces in North Africa. “Wavell’s Thirty Thousand” were now as famous as the Battle of Britain’s “few.”

  But five days after Beda Fomm, with Wavell’s army poised to conquer Tripoli, Churchill ordered him to halt the advance and send his best troops to defend Greece against the Axis powers. The result was a disaster, with the British forced to evacuate to Crete and then from Crete itself. Meanwhile, a little-known German general, Erwin Rommel, arrived in Tunis with the newly formed Afrika Korps. By the end of April he had pushed the Desert Rats all the way back to the Egyptian border, leaving Tobruk under siege.

  Wavell’s relations with the volatile and voluble Churchill were poor. His shyness, which had served him well in giving him the space for silent thought and allowing him to turn a problem around in the light and view it from another angle, now became a shortcoming. Churchill demanded action on every front and regarded Wavell’s hedge-betting communiqués as evidence of undue caution. He wanted him to support the Free French plan to invade Syria and Iraq, held by French forces loyal to the Vichy regime—which was why de Gaulle had been in Cairo and why Wavell was not keen to see him.

  Noel Annan, who worked as a military intelligence officer in the War Office and knew both Churchill and Wavell, saw the contrast between two public school types: the old Harrovian prime minister, buccaneering and impatient of protocol, and the Wykehamist soldier-scholar, careful and reserved. The contrast was also between Churchill the crowd-pleasing politician, aware that war was partly about propaganda and placating allies, and Wavell the close-mouthed general concerned only with the rightness of military strategy. This second contrast lay at the heart of their worst quarrel: over whether to hold Tobruk. For Wavell the port was militarily unimportant; for Churchill it was a symbol of resistance and crucial to morale. On Wavell’s trips to London, Churchill questioned him fiercely and was annoyed by his stumbling, mumbling answers. Ian Jacob, later director-general of the BBC, who attended these meetings as a war cabinet secretary, said it was “hard to make anyone understand how tongue-tied Wavell was, and therefore how little impression he gave of intellect and character.”24

  After the disastrous failure in June 1941 of Operation Battleaxe, a Churchill-inspired plan to relieve Tobruk, the prime minister relieved Wavell of his posting and demoted him to commander-in-chief, India. The war correspondent Alan Moorehead, saddened by the news, likened Wavell to the defender of Moscow, General Kutuzov, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace: old and one-eyed, a philosopher of human nature, modest and aware of complexity, unlike the vain and coldly calculating Napoleon. “His fine head, his lined and leathery face, even his blind eye, give you the feeling of strength and sagacity and patience,” wrote Moorehead of Wavell, “though there is little in what he says normally to suggest any of those qualities.”25

  The third Battle of El Alamein is now remembered as a watershed victory of the war, with General Montgomery as its Admiral Nelson. Montgomery was arrogant and egotistical—and Wavell’s complete opposite. The self-proclaimed savior of the British army, he drove from unit to unit as if he were campaigning for election, making barnstorming speeches about trouncing Rommel and imbuing his troops with the self-fulfilling impression that he had engineered a sea change in morale.

  “It may almost be said,” wrote Churchill later, “‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.’”26 But neither claim was true. Well before El Alamein, Wavell had all but destroyed Italy’s Tenth Army, shattering Italian morale and Mussolini’s vision of an African empire. As the architect of the first big Allied victories, he delivered vital uplift when the Axis seemed invincible. His march across the desert can also now be seen as the first great deceptive campaign, one that institutionalized deception as a war strategy and culminated in the more celebrated strategic deceits before D-day. If the English genius for military deception was cultivated from English shyness, then Wavell was its exemplar.

  But well before Wavell died in 1950, his role in the war was fading from memory, bumped aside by his self-promoting successors, largely because he himself stayed silent. He did not say a word to support or exonerate his war record—not even in writing, at which he was a model of eloquence and clarity, quite the opposite of his speaking self. Instead he invested his energies in compiling an anthology, Other Men’s Flowers (1944), of the poems he knew by heart. A best-seller, it was an odd book to be compiled by such a shy man, for in it he affirmed the value of poetry as public communication rather than interior mental journey and criticized T. S. Eliot in its opening pages for “sinn[ing] against the light of poetry by wrapping his great talent in the napkin of obscurity.” Wavell pointed out that poetry was in origin a declamatory art and, with typical magnanimity, praised the “characteristic gusto” with which Churchill recited verse. Here also lay a tinge of regret, for while he knew reams of it by rote, Wavell said poetry out loud only while riding a horse or driving alone and wished he could fly solo so he could “declaim it in the skies.”27 Otherwise, for fear of being overheard, he would not even risk reciting it in the bath.

  One person who never had any trouble talking to Wavell was the queen, because she knew she just had to broach his favorite topic, the Black Watch, of which she happened to be colonel-in-chief, and he would relax. The king had no such luck and called Wavell “the oyster” because he was so hard to prize open.28 But George VI could equally have been describing himself. Like Wavell, he talked fairly fluently about his pet subjects, such as factory assembly lines and breeding game birds. But he never mastered small talk, a greater failing in a monarch than in a soldier. His fear of not knowing what to say was aggravated by his fear of not being able to say it. Since the age of seven he had suffered from an appalling stammer.

  Early theories about stammerers saw them as almost literally tongue-tied, either because their tongues were too hard and thick, as Aristotle thought, or because they were too moist and cold, as Francis Bacon believed. With the rising interest in psychiatry in the late nineteenth century, stammering came to be seen as a symptom of nervous debility and shyness. To want to speak, but to contrive not to, seemed like a classic
instance of the counterproductive, irrational impulses of the unconscious mind. Nowadays we tend to see stammering once again as a mechanical problem, a neurodevelopmental disorder that emerges, for unknown reasons, in about one in twenty young children. And yet it still seems rooted in the uniquely human capacity for self-reflection, which is why stepping outside that self can offer temporary relief. Stammering actors rarely suffer while playing a role; nor do stammerers stumble when they sing or speak in a different language. The stammering Henry James was fluent when speaking French, and he could chant his favorite poems to friends.

  As with overthinking one’s shyness, overthinking one’s stammer only makes it worse, creating a vicious circle of disfluency. Like shyness, stammering is curiously intermittent, so that stammerers who feel they have conquered it can find it returning unbidden at the most inconvenient times. If shyness is not necessarily a cause of stammering, then stammering is certainly a cause of shyness, for many sufferers choose not to speak for fear they will be unable to.

  As a young boy, George VI, then Prince Albert, would, along with the other royal children, have to learn a poem by rote on the occasion of his grandparents’ birthdays and recite it to assembled guests. This terrifying ordeal confirmed him in his desire to remain silent whenever possible. As a naval cadet, he was marked down as stupid because he could not say “quarter” and thus failed to respond when asked what half of a half was. On one occasion, in his twenties, he was so nervous when addressing an audience of farmers in the Midlands that he emitted a wordless mumble for several minutes while his equerry stood by his side wondering what to do.29 After this, Prince Albert settled for seeming rude. When people were introduced to him at functions, he would shake hands and move mutely on.

  Prince Albert’s misfortune was that he came of age in the new regime of mass media democracy, when the royal family had to legitimize its power with the spoken word. For a shy prince, radio and film presented endless potential for humiliation and disgrace. At the opening of the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, King George V’s speech at Wembley Stadium was heard by millions of listeners. In May 1925, Albert, now Duke of York, succeeded his older brother as president of the exhibition and had to make a brief speech introducing the king at Wembley as it reopened for the year. He fretted about it for months, going over the lines endlessly in his head: “Your Majesty, as President, I ask you graciously to declare open again the British Empire Exhibition . . .”

  Just before noon on May 9 he stood on Wembley’s royal dais and waited for the 1,200-strong Brigade of Guards to finish playing the national anthem. This kind of pomp and ceremony unnerved him. All his life his most hated duty was inspecting troops, having to examine the polish on boots and the sharpness of creases while knowing that the soldiers were all watching him. Now the troops went rigid, and a deep hush fell over the stadium as 90,000 people waited for him to open his mouth and for sound to come out. The speech began badly. The loudspeakers were giving feedback, so he had the ill luck, which can befuddle even the most confident, of hearing his own voice a beat after it left his mouth.

  People who don’t stammer, especially those who cruelly ape those who do, think it is just about repeating the start of a word. But a stammerer wrestling with a word is more likely to make either no noise at all or a sucking sound as they inhale air instead of letting their voice travel upward through the diaphragm on an outward breath. The duke’s speech was full of such excruciating pauses as his facial muscles worked overtime but no sound came out. As with many stammerers, the constant jaw-tightening meant that talking exhausted him. The Wembley speech was being broadcast live across the country, over the wireless as well as through Daily Mail loudspeakers installed in public places. It was the first time his people had encountered his stammer. While the rest of the Wembley crowd squirmed in sympathy for the duke, an Australian called Lionel Logue turned to his son and said quietly that he thought he could cure him.

  Logue was a pioneer in the new field of speech therapy. During the war he had treated soldiers afflicted with speech disorders as a result of shell shock and gas attacks. One of his patients was John Wheeler-Bennett, who was left with a stammer after his Kent prep school was bombed in 1916. “Only those who have themselves suffered the tragedies of the stammerer can appreciate to the full their depth and poignancy,” Wheeler-Bennett wrote from the heart half a century later, in his biography of George VI. “The bitter humiliation and anguish of the spirit . . . the shrinking from help prompted by pity.”30

  In his small consulting rooms at the cheap end of Harley Street, Logue encountered quiet misery daily. One of his patients, on her commute home to Earls Court from the City, would go on a different line back to Hammersmith and walk from there, rather than attempt the hard k in “Court” when buying a ticket. Another, scared of speaking to bus conductors, would ensure she always had the exact fare in small change. Perhaps the Duke of York was listening, on August 19, 1925, three months after his Wembley disaster, to a BBC radio talk by Logue about stammering titled “Voices and Brick Walls.” “I know of nothing which will build so huge a brick wall as this defect,” Logue told listeners. “The ordinary procedure of buying a train ticket, or asking to be directed in the street, is untold agony.”31

  Most of us know the film version. In The King’s Speech (2010), Logue insists on holding sessions at his consulting rooms, where he has no receptionist, rather than the duke’s home, and on being on first-name terms with “Bertie,” even calling him “mate.” Logue draws the duke out, much against his will, to discuss personal matters: his overbearing father, the nanny who preferred his brother and pinched him to make him cry, the painful metal splints he was made to wear for his knock knees. Logue gets the duke to cut loose, to say “shit fuck bugger” to fill in the pauses in his speeches. For his stammer is the result not, as the duke insists, merely of “mechanical difficulties” but deep-rooted repressions. The film champions the informal, modern values of Logue, this “jumped-up jackaroo from the outback,” against upper-class English stiffness.

  But the real Logue was no tea-and-empathy therapist. His methods were practical; he taught his patients to breathe properly and relax their muscles so that they did not spasm. His was no miracle cure, and not all of his patients got better. The appeal of stammering to the cinematic imagination, whose narrative logic demands a crisis and a solution, is that it feels like an obstacle to be decisively overcome. In reality, the stammerer has to cope with the untidy coming-and-going of symptoms. In modern stammering therapy the word “cure” is rarely used. Most young children who stammer grow out of it, but those who are still stammering in their teens rarely do.

  The real king’s speech improved slightly under Logue’s tuition. But Logue still had to close-read the text of any speech the king had to make, finding alternatives for bothersome words, such as those starting with s, f, g, and k—the latter a special torment because the king often had to refer to the queen and the kingdom (which Logue replaced with “her majesty” and “our realm”). For the rest of his life the king dreaded the state opening of Parliament, which meant delivering a speech while seated, since sitting constricted his breathing. He told Logue of an anxiety dream in which he was in the House of Lords with his mouth opening and shutting but nothing coming out.32 All his life he feared the radio microphone and the flashing red light that told him to start speaking. He was often photographed sitting in front of one of the custom-made royal microphones mounted in an art deco oak case. But he loathed these most of all, saying the design reminded him of the Cenotaph in London, and they were always replaced by normal microphones for the actual broadcast.

  Even when the king mastered his stammer, he spoke monotonously, with a lisp and the generally poor vocal skills of the shy man who expects talking to be a trial. In the film George VI overcomes his stutter in a rousing broadcast on the day war breaks out; the people roar their approval from the Mall while Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto soars in the background. It is like the Arthurian legend
of the Fisher King, whose impotence renders his kingdom a barren wasteland and who must be restored to potency to lead his people into war. If you listen to the real king’s speech delivered on that day, it proceeds by what Logue called “three-word breaks,” developed to carry him along from one strategically placed breathing pause to the next. When this technique worked, it gave his speech an accidental gravity, a pleasing series of ascensions and dying falls. When it failed, as here, the king could only manage a word at a time, and the breaks came in odd places: “In this grave . . . hour . . . perhaps . . . the most fateful . . . in our history . . . I send . . . to every household of my people . . . both at home . . . and overseas . . . this message.”

  In real life, there was no Hollywood ending. Stammering, like shyness, is a life sentence. “The King broadcast a speech last night which was badly spoken enough, I should have thought, to finish the Royal Family in this country,” wrote the poet Stephen Spender in his diary. “His voice sounds like a very spasmodic often interrupted tape machine. It produces an effect of colourless monotony . . . First of all one tries to listen to what he is saying. Then one forgets this and starts sympathizing with him in his difficulties. Then one wants to smash the radio.”33

  Throughout the war people listened gingerly to the king’s broadcasts, wondering if he would get through them. In John Boorman’s autobiographical film Hope and Glory (1987), set in semi-detached London suburbia during the war, the twelveyear-old Bill Rohan and his family have finished their Christmas dinner and are listening to the king’s message. As he makes it to the end, Bill’s father, Clive, says, “He was a lot better this year.” The rest mumble agreement, but Bill says, “You said that last year, Dad.” His father replies: “The land and the King are one, my son. If he stutters, we falter. He’s getting better, and so are we.” The national anthem strikes up on the wireless, and they all stand anxiously to attention. The monarch’s stuttering reflects a nation similarly stuttering in response to mortal danger; Churchill’s voice, booming hearteningly out of the radio later on in the film, marks the turning of the tide.